Published: July 4, 1982

ALTHOUGH I have subscribed to The Nation magazine off and on since I was an obnoxious 12-year-old, I've certainly never read it for laughs. The Nation was serious, like European movies and five-year plans; they even printed it on black bread. All this changed - at least it did once every three weeks - in 1978, when the new editor of The Nation, Victor S. Navasky, hired his old friend Calvin Trillin to write a column for which Navasky was prepared to pay ''something in the high two figures,'' or $65 a shot.

Navasky also hired another old friend, Richard Lingeman, to be his managing editor. Lingeman can be just as funny as Trillin, but he is always disappearing to write books. It is significant that Trillin and Lingeman were both associated with Navasky in the sporadic - indeed, palsied - publication of a satire magazine called Monocle during the late 1950's and early 1960's. Monocle still owes me money. On the other hand, with such bookends at The Nation as Trillin and Lingeman, Navasky can afford to be the sort of serious person his mother would have wished.

Trillin, of course, spends most of his time being paid by another magazine, The New Yorker, to go to places ew York Times. like Kansas City and eat ribs. Consequently, he has published a number of books of serious journalism, one or two of them - the whimsy is typical - called novels. But ''Uncivil Liberties'' is a remarkable glimpse of the Trillin many of us have met at literary cocktail parties and high-school productions, the kind of Trillin who once explained to me, when I complained that Navasky never returned my telephone calls, ''You must understand, that would cost him a message unit.''

Trillin is married. The Trillins have children. These children want to know who lost China. Mrs. Trillin, Alice, gave Cyprus to Mr. Trillin for his birthday; for the next 12 months, she would think about Cyprus and he wouldn't have to. Mr. Trillin, for Christmas, gave Mrs. Trillin Iran. Neither of them was willing to take over thinking about the SALT talks. Does this sound like a marriage in trouble?

There is a real question whether The Nation, any Nation, is altogether serious when it is heard to say: ''I have resisted the theory that the president has trouble telling black people apart because the only black person he knows is Sammy Davis Jr.'' Or: ''(Why doesn't) Mrs. Reagan trade one of her ballgowns for the Federal hot-lunch program?'' Or, because health food makes Mr. Trillin sick: ''If bumblebee leavings and stump paste are so good for you, why can't any of those guys grow full beards?''

And, arguing that literary-award winners should be selected by the people they are accustomed to being judged by: ''the maitre d' at Elaine's, the director of admissions for the Dalton School, the senior counterman at Zabar's and the head of the co-op apartment division of Helmsley-Spear Real Estate.''

Moreover: ''First a country gets a drugstore. Then it gets the Hbomb.'' Is it fair to accuse Theodore Sorensen of ''reversible raincoat sentences''? Is it necessary to explain why wristwatches worn by members of the New Jersey State Legislature all cost $200,000 and look like Cadillac Eldorados? Is it even advisable?

Trillin, however, can't help himself from occasionally being serious, as if, in the pages of The Nation, he sometimes felt that the shade of Carey McWilliams was looking down at him, probably from on top of the Dnepr Dam, and telling him to think about a 3-percent increase in the Soviet pig-iron production. Thus:

''For years, the property tax has remained philosophically dormant while the income tax laws expressed the values of the society. Allowing an income-tax deduction for mortgage interest, for instance, is obviously another way of saying that every man should have a castle - or two or three castles if he is able to pick up a deal on a beach house and scrapes up the down payment on a ski chalet. The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work. The deduction for charitable contributions is simply the government's way of indicating that rich people are in a better position than poor people to decide which eleemosynary institutions are deserving of the taxpayers' support. Why else would coal miners be required to share the cost of a stockbroker's gift to the St. Paul's School boathouse fund?''

I submit that this is profound and that ''Uncivil Liberties'' is wonderful.

* It is probably no big secret that Vladimir Estragon is really Geoffrey Stokes - he said so himself, to me, a complete stranger, once on the telephone, and I believe him -which means that the person who has been writing about food in the pages of The Village Voice for the past five years is also the person who has been writing, just as well under another name, about politics, sports and trashy novels. He and Trillin would enjoy each other's company, if not Kansas City.

Estragon's habit, like M.F.K. Fisher's, is to think about something else - holidays, fatherhood, popular music, skunks, Rousseau and Hobbes, Arica, paper napkins, cats, Luis Tiant - before getting around to the real business of strawberries, clams, cabbage, champagne, chestnuts, braised lamb, the asparagus problem, refrigerators and his mustache. He manages in this collection of his food columns to make us like him very much. Like Trillin, he can also be profound: ''Meat is not a liquid,'' he informs us; so much for Scottish bread soup in his ongoing negotiations with his semivegetarian wife, the Woman Warrior, over which days of their week will or will not be carnivorous.

One quotes at random: ''Back in the days when everybody was having nervous breakdowns, I was never able to fit one in.'' (And this from someone with a Ph.D., trained by Jesuits.) Or, on shopping at the supermarket: ''aisles to go before I sleep.'' Or, in the matter of female breasts when there's a baby around: ''If there are two breasts per household, each parent should have one.'' As for the obligatory plum pudding on Christmas Day: ''Don't get me wrong - I'd rather get presents and endure plum pudding than escape it and get none - but the absence of the stuff is a strong point in Flag Day's favor.''

I happen not to be the least interested in parsnips, tuna fish, cocoa, Bavarian cream or stocks and bonds. (Restaurants, in my opinion, are an excellent idea; with the check, they punish us for our gluttony.) But Estragon is really writing about civilization, about love and ''the mid-life crazies,'' about haunted houses and surprising children and the innocence and exuberance so many of us felt back in the days of Monocle magazine. These are recipes for the soul.

It occurs to me: Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays. Once upon a time, essays were about beauty and truth. If, in the fine collected work of such essayists as Trillin and Estragon, we can find some truth and beauty even when we're reading about politics and food, then we can find truth and beauty anywhere, and the essay will grow up and go to college and meet someone wonderful and have grandchildren of which one inordinately approves.